999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number

Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and hislongtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits.

But for most of Woz's life there were no Silicon Valley exchanges withthree matching digits, so Woz had to be satisfied with numbers like221-1111. Then, one day, while eavesdropping on cell phone calls, Wozbegin hearing a new exchange: 888. And then, after more months ofscheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phonenumber, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.

The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrongnumbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible tomisdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there wasnever anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or,not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of atelevision in the background, or somebody talking softly in English orSpanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.

Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a womansay, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiverwas snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: thehundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. Theywere picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom ofthe handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beepbeep beep beep."

The children of America were making their first prank call.

And the person who answered the phone was Woz.

I repeatedly emailed myself from my work email address to myfistname.mylastname@popularservice.com - I kept forgetting the "the." at the start of my own email address. I only realised when the owner of the other address politely wrote back asking me to stop doing this. I hadn't noticed because the emails were just autohotkey script backups and xml files containing machine settings for a laser cutter and I wasn't really paying attention as to whether I had received them or not.

Anyway, I got tired of trying to spell english-word email address to people over the phone, so I registered a domain and now have an unambiguous email address a364 athingy k45j dotthingy com - it's heaps easier to say and write down and nobody has a similar address because I own the domain.

>As it happens, the choice of 999 was fortunate for accessibility reasons, compared with e.g. lower numbers, because in the dark or in dense smoke 999 could be dialled by placing a finger one hole away from the dial stop (see the articles on rotary dial and GPO telephones) and rotating the dial to the full extent three times. This enables all users including the visually impaired to easily dial the emergency number. It is also the case that it is relatively easy for 111, and other low-number sequences, to be called accidentally, including when transmission wires making momentary contact produce a pulse similar to dialling (e.g. when overhead cables touch in high winds)

So maybe by fortune only, but it doesn't sound so crappy.

On the other hand, anecdotally (we have had 112 or 113 here for as long as I can remember) I have seen reports on newspapers of people (with movenments limited, like being tied or wounded or however impaired) that managed to "dial" these "low" numbers by just quickly pushing and releasing the hook button with their foot (or nose, etc.).